While software spending in the mid-market is poised to return to positive growth , this sector of the market is generally cost conscious and is likely to expect increased ROI and high value for each dollar spent on technology. This is where we believe that server virtualization is particularly positioned to deliver, not only value, but overall savings as well.

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers. We expect this announcement to help our partners by driving additional value to end customers.

As The VAR Guy pointed out earlier this fall, virtualized environments can yield up to a “60% return on investment over a four year time period,” which we feel is an opportunity that our partners and their customers can’t afford to pass up.

Server virtualization is expected to help customers reduce server “sprawl,” reduce maintenance and energy costs and increase performance capabilities. Additionally, Red Hat channel partners can assist their end customers with deployment, configuration, and consultation around virtualized servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is an end-to-end virtualization solution designed to enable pervasive datacenter virtualization and significantly enhance capital and operational efficiency. It consists of the following components:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers: A feature-rich server virtualization management system that provides advanced capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more.

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor: A modern hypervisor based on Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology, which can be deployed either as the standalone bare metal hypervisor (included), or as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and later (purchased separately) installed as a hypervisor host and managed through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers.

With the announcement this summer of our enhanced North American Partner Program, partners in North America must be authorized to sell Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products; which includes being a registered Red Hat partner with a Virtualization Specialization. The specialization is achieved when a partner employs at least one Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technical-certified associate and at least two Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization sales-certified associates. Partners can click here to register for both the sales and technical courses.

The introduction of general availability for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is an exciting opportunity for our valued partners in North America to be on the leading edge of Red Hat’s deeper expansion into the virtualization market.

Did you hear Red Hat was named #1 software vendor for value and reliability in the CIO Insight Vendor Value Study for the fifth time? That’s right. More than 650 IT executives ranked Red Hat the highest among software vendors on the overall list of IT vendors across all categories– software, networking, hardware and security. To top it off, Red Hat also topped the list for meeting expectations for increasing revenues, flexibility and responsiveness. Want to find out how Red Hat delivers value year-after-year? Come find us at one of these events around the world and let us tell you!

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Visit JBoss at the Business Rules Forum, November 1-5, in Las Vegas, NV. JBoss is a Gold Sponsor, and will be located in booth #10 on the Exhibit floor. Stop by to see a demo of our Business Rules Management System, talk to the experts, or register to win a Flip Mino Camera! For more information, click here.

Red Hat is a Gold Sponsor of the upcoming 451 Group Client Event November 3-4 in Boston, MA. Come see Red Hat Vice President of Field Marketing, Joel Berman speak on the panel “Open Source to the Rescue?” on Tuesday, November 3 at 2:30 p.m. For more information, click here.

Planning to attend the USDA/ NITC Technology Expo in Kansas City, MO on November 4? Come talk with Red Hat Government Solutions. For more information, click here.

Red Hat is a premier sponsor of GOSCON DC on November 5. Held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., GOSCON DC is designed to meet the needs of senior IT executives of federal agencies and regional, state, and local government. For more information and to register, click here.

Come have breakfast with Red Hat! At the Red Hat & IBM Executive Breakfast Series, IBM and Red Hat will discuss the benefits of migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM platforms from Sun Solaris solutions. Check out when and where you can receive valuable insight from Red Hat and IBM below. For more information and to register for one of these events, click here.

Nov. 5,, Toronto, The Intercontinental Centre
Nov. 12, Chicago, Blackstone Renaissance

Check out the Red Hat booth at SuperComputing 2009, November 14-20 in Portland. SC09 will feature interesting and innovative HPC scientific and technical applications from around the world. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, will deliver a talk at Carnegie Mellon University on November 16. More information to come soon!

Calling all Red Hat Certified Engineers! Red Hat is hosting an RHCE Loopback, November 18 at the Philadelphia Mission Grill. Get together to network, share tips and technical tricks, discuss new technologies and hear from experts on current and future industry trends. For more information and to register, click here.

Visit Red Hat at booth number 2829 at I/ITSEC 2009, November 30 – December 3 in Orlando. The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference promotes cooperation among the Armed Services, Industry, Academia and various Government agencies in pursuit of improved training and education programs, identification of common training issues and development of multiservice programs. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

Red Hat will give a technical presentation on Fedora for System Z, RHEL 5.4 and more at the IBM Large Systems Update series. See below for dates, locations, and links for more information.

Nov. 2-3, 2009: IBM Lyngby, Nymøllevej 91, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Nov. 3-4, 2009: IBM Helsinki, Laajalahdentie 23, 00330 Helsinki
Nov. 4-5, 2009: IBM Århus, Bytoften 1, 8240 Risskov
Nov. 9-10, 2009: Rosenholmveien 25, Kolbotn, Oslo
Nov. 10-11, 2009: Oddegatan 5, Stockholm
Nov. 10-11, 2009: IBM Lyngby, Nymøllevej 91, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Nov. 11-12, 2009: Lindholmspiren 5, Goteborg

Red Hat will be at LinuxWorld Netherlands, November 4-5. Visit the Red Hat booth and attend sessions by Red Hat associates. For more information and to register, click here.

For the fourth year in a row, JBoss will attend Devoxx, the biggest Java community conference in Europe, as a premium sponsor. Come see several JBoss engineers speak at the event, November 16-20 in Antwerp/Belgium, to present the newest JBoss products and developer tools. For information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will host the November Red Hat Tour de France events in Toulouse, November 17 and Lille, November 19. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat and IBM invite you to learn about the winning combination of IBM mainframe technology and Linux on November 24 at IBM United Kingdom Limited in London. Get insights on how Red Hat Enterprise Linux can make your IT life easier and how we can help you reduce IT spending. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

Red Hat will be at SAP TechEd India, November 18-20 in Bangalore. Join us at the KTPO Trade Center and dive deep into the world of SAP TechED to get hands-on technical training, build real connections with SAP experts and community members, and gain the inspiration and skills needed to maximize your impact on your organization. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on Red Hat’s APAC events, click here.

Latin America

For more information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, click here.
Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com

There are plenty of new features slated for Fedora 12 and we’ll be featuring just a few over the next few weeks in our spotlight feature blog series. Enhancements to SystemTap should delight developers and system administrators. Here are just a few of the reasons why we love SystemTap — be sure to check out a more in-depth overview and podcast on SystemTap here.

Red Hat’s Will Cohen, a performance tools engineer and SystemTap developer, best sums up SystemTap in stating: “Being able to modify and instrument code to understand what is going on in open source is cool, but having to recompile the code and restart machine to run that modified code isn’t so cool. SystemTap provides infrastructure to simplify that instrumentation process. It allows developers and system administrators to instrument the kernel and user space programs without the need to recompile, restart or even stop your program or system. They can observe what is happening without having to stop or interrupt anything.”

SystemTap 1.0, which is part of Fedora 12, brings at least three significant sets of improvements. First, it includes a variety of new features, such as the ability to take advantage of kernel tracepoints, extended support for C++ code, and a set of static probe markers programmers can include in their code to make tracing easier. If supporting debugging information or “debuginfo” isn’t installed on the system, the newest versions of SystemTap even suggest the command needed to get the appropriate debuginfo RPM installed. Developers are currently at work making that debuginfo more compact, and we expect to see that feature in a future Fedora release, supported fully by SystemTap. » Read more

We’ve been using the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) solution in our production environment at Red Hat for two months and I wanted to share our experience. We are a participant in the RHEV beta program and partnered with our product organization in support of the deployment.

We are operating 24 virtual machines in production. They include six JBoss cluster nodes for our Java services that drive www.redhat.com; four Knowledgebase cluster nodes used by our customers and customer support team; six mail exchanger nodes handling our internal email delivery; and four mail exchanger nodes handling our external email delivery. The physical infrastructure consists of a blade chassis with 14 HS21 blades (8GB RAM, dual core processor) and 1.2TB of SAN based storage provided by our Network Appliance infrastructure. The production nodes have been stable. They are performing equivalently to the bare metal nodes they replaced for both the JBoss and external mail exchanger workloads. Performance of the other nodes is very acceptable and in line with our expectations.

Also as expected, RHEV has given us the ability to monitor resource utilization and quickly provision new nodes. We have information and tools to plan for future capacity increases. The resource management tools are excellent. RHEV does a very good job of transparently managing storage, memory and processor utilization. The presentation of the allocation and utilization of resources is very clear. Live migrations, including automatic migrations, are very fast and reliable. The paravirtualized drivers are a significant improvement over base KVM and Xen and have performed very well. The management interface is intuitive and generally easy to use.

The RHEV hypervisor installs were easy and integrated well with our automated installation framework. As noted, the product is solid and resilient. We haven’t experienced any crashes or other hypervisor problems as are often encountered in beta environments. The virtual machines behave exactly as one would expect and respond to our existing tools just like our physical hosts. We encountered three issues during installation, but were able to resolve them quickly with workarounds or configuration changes. It took us roughly one week to install the machines and get them into production. Deployment has been a very solid experience for a beta environment.

In addition to our server deployment, we are working to deploy a RHEV cluster to provide desktop virtualization for end user applications and expect to have it up and running later this month.

The Fedora Project’s latest release Fedora 12 – codename “Constantine” – is anticipated to be released in November. Much like its namesake Constantine, Fedora 12 is ready to unite with a feature set that includes plenty for everyone!

Fedora 12 is expected to include numerous enhancements and features added since the release of Fedora 11 in June 2009, such as these:

• PackageKit has grown the ability to automatically install the software packages that provide new commands when the user is operating a text terminal. It also now supports a browser plugin that allows software vendors of any size to provide automatic installation of software packages using simple HTML object tags.
• Enhancements to NetworkManager to make both system-wide connections and mobile broadband connections easier than ever. Signal strength and network selection are available for choosing the best mobile broadband connection when you’re on the road. And if you’re at a system that requires an always-on connection or static addressing, NetworkManager now is designed to allow you to configure that connection directly from the desktop, and includes PolicyKit integration so configuration management can be done via central policy where needed.
• For several years, the open, free Ogg Theora format has provided a way for freedom-loving users to share video. Fedora 12 includes the new Theora 1.1, which achieves near-H.264 quality in a completely free and open codec and format. (A detailed and highly technical status report can be found here.) With the introduction of Theora 1.1, we believe that the quality of free video will meet or exceed user expectations, delivering crisp, vibrant media in both streaming and downloadable form.
• New higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable, and easy to manage solutions. The newest features include better memory and performance management, hot network adapter changes, discovery of SAN storage, improved virtual disk image performance, a newer PXE boot infrastructure, and the new libguestfs library and guestfish shell to allow highly automated manipulation of virtual machines outside the virtualization environment.

We encourage everyone to download the Beta and take it for a spin. Let us know what you think and be sure to report any issues with the Beta to help Fedora improve the final release. Anyone can download the Beta as an installation medium or a Live image to try it on their system. Check it out today by downloading here.

Red Hat continues to be very active in the cloud computing arena, so it seems like a good time to provide an update on some recent activities.

First is Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens’ keynote speech at the recent Red Hat Summit and JBoss World events in Chicago. Brian focused his presentation on cloud computing and referenced a number of cloud-related open source projects that Red Hat is supporting. To see his presentation, please visit here. The conference also featured a number of cloud presentations, which you can download from here.

At the 100,000-foot level, during the last few months a couple of fairly obvious patterns appear to be emerging:

• The first is that cloud computing seems to be primarily x86 based, and 64-bit x86 at that. This appears to be driven by the strong desire of cloud consumers to use standardized hardware and software wherever possible. And, we believe that it is being enabled by the latest generation of x86 processors, which feature lots of cores for huge processing power, very large memory capabilities and small space/power requirements. Red Hat’s experience to date with its cloud customers is that they are all x86-based. Perhaps a small percentage of non-x86 clouds will be built, but it seems very likely that they will be limited to private deployments. Some expect this further adoption of the x86 architecture to hasten the decline of RISC/UNIX in the market.
• The second is that while the benefits of clouds are well understood by most CIOs and IT managers, the barriers to widespread cloud adoption are also becoming clear. One of the most important barriers relates to cloud standards or, the other side of the same coin, the need to avoid any sort of vendor lock-in. Clearly, until cloud standards are established and accepted by cloud service providers, customers are likely to limit their usage of cloud computing, reducing its potential value. Other barriers range from technical (such as ensuring security) to operational (application data management) to business issues (pricing models). So, while there are successful clouds available today, there is still a lot of work to be done before cloud computing is appropriate for a wide range of deployments.

Coming down from the 100,000-foot clouds, some exciting recent developments include:

• On October 5th, DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) announced the availability of its RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) cloud capability. See here and here.

  RACE is available internally to DoD (US Department of Defense) organizations. “This is all about our customers,” said Henry J. Sienkiewicz, Technical Program Director, DISA Computing Services, adding, “RACE is a first for DoD – our users can now customize, purchase, and receive their test and development computing platform within 24 hours and the production environments within 72 hours, and that’s a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements.”

  RACE is x86-based and provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows guests.

• On October 8th, NTT Communications launched its cloud beta, based on Red Hat Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology. See here.

  NTT, a major Japanese telecommunications company, partnered with Red Hat to create its cloud platform. And, NTT continues to work with Red Hat to advance the capabilities of KVM.

• Deltacloud, announced by Brian Stevens during his Red Hat Summit keynote, appears to be attracting attention as a way to address interoperability concerns. The following excerpt provides an overview of Deltacloud:

  With the rapidly expanding cloud market, there will be a profusion of suppliers, offering a wide range of capabilities (from high-cost, high-performance, high-security, high-availability, to low-cost with few guarantees). Suppliers are already offering a range of management APIs (interfaces) and tools for customers that reflect the capabilities they offer. Concurrent with this, customers are building private clouds that they will eventually wish to integrate with external suppliers. The resulting range of management interfaces will complicate the seamless integration of private and multiple public clouds, making them less valuable to customers. This is where Deltacloud comes in – its goal is to provide an open, standardized interface that can be used to manage any and all clouds. Being an open source project, customers and suppliers will be able to extend it to meet their needs. Backend drivers will provide the connection to individual cloud services. Essentially Deltacloud becomes a cloud management broker – for example, a management application using Deltacloud would be able to identify a low cost cloud, or a high performance cloud, or a highly secure cloud, and provide a consistent management interface to all of them. In this way Deltacloud does not replace individual cloud management capabilities, rather it provides a higher-level abstraction across a broad landscape of clouds.

• On October 7, Red Hat and Microsoft announced the completion of our first virtualization certifications, so that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows can be deployed together, as host or guest, and be fully supported by both companies. Details of this announcement can be seen on Red Hat website.

  This announcement opens the way for customers who are looking to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows together on their private clouds to move ahead — confident that these heterogeneous configurations have been tested and that both companies will stand by them. So hosting and cloud providers now have more flexibility to mix and match Red Hat and Microsoft virtualization technologies. Of course, we are driving to make our virtualization solution valuable and compelling, so that customers will choose a Red Hat virtualization infrastructure for their clouds but, as we’ve pointed out several times in this blog, choice, coexistence and standards are the values that we expect will make clouds successful.

  To summarize, the completed certifications include:

  • Validation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using the KVM hypervisor, with Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests.
  • Certification of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 guests.
• Last, but certainly not least, Amazon EC2, Red Hat’s first cloud computing partner, appears to be growing from strength to strength. We have had Red Hat offerings on EC2 for 18+ months. We are seeing stronger interest in wider adoption of EC2 deployments using both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss, and we continue to work closely with Amazon on future cloud technologies, so stay tuned for more news on that front later this year.

To summarize, the last few months have seen great progress from Red Hat in the cloud computing space. Standards-based open source technology is a natural fit for the cloud. As with other areas of technology focus, Red Hat seeks to drive innovation as rapidly as possible to enable customers and partners to realize the efficiencies of cloud computing quickly.

The world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange, CME Group, deploys Red Hat solutions for its critical trading platforms to produce over a quadrillion dollars in contract volume per year, according to CME Group. Its migration from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2003 has helped CME Group increase performance, reliability, scalability and agility of its critical systems while simultaneously reducing IT costs.

At the Red Hat Summit 2009, held in Chicago from September 1-4, CME Group invited the Summit’s onsite press core to visit its trading floor. CME Group Associate Director Vinod Kutty and Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed how the companies’ long-standing technology partnership has helped the exchange to meet technical and business demands to remain on the cutting-edge. Together, the companies aim to extend CME Group’s innovative open source strategy with an ongoing migration of its middleware platform from Oracle WebLogic to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Watch the video, live from CME Group on September 3, 2009:

For more information about CME Group’s use of Red Hat solutions, read the full case study, or check out CME Group’s Red Hat Summit presentations.

There is no doubt that Oracle OpenWorld this year has drawn extra attention with the activity and speculation about the next steps in Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. With the breadth of applications based upon Oracle’s premier database, Oracle OpenWorld has also set the scene for a number of announcements around industry-leading benchmarks from the technology leaders at the event, including Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the operating system used to establish several new benchmarks announced this week that demonstrate the performance and scalability of current x86 systems. Getting the most from multi-core systems requires an operating system, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that can manage large thread counts and I/O throughput to deliver real application performance.

IBM announced three new results running different benchmarks in Oracle Application Standard Benchmarks. The benchmarks, which were developed by Oracle, represent typical user workloads on the E-Business Suite ERP deployment. The different scenarios focus on different types of ERP transactions such as payroll processing, or order transactions. In each case the benchmark combines batch processing and transactional workloads in a single test. Some of these steps are CPU intensive, while others stress I/O access. Data sizes and the number of users is defined as small, medium or large to assist Oracle customers in sizing their deployment.

The results are measured in transactions per hour, or throughput. IBM’s results were over 143,000 lines per hour on the order-to-cash benchmark, an increase of almost 40 percent over previous results. For the Payroll benchmarks, hourly employee throughput was measured at 207,612 on the medium database model and 364,786 on the large benchmark. The tests were performed using a single IBM System x3550 M2 with dual 4-core Intel Xeon 5500 processors on which the application server and the database instance were both deployed. The tests were run on 10 threads, oversubscribing the eight cores on the server.

The purpose of these benchmarks is to guide an Oracle customer in understanding their workload. With its broad hardware and software support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the operating system chosen to test these application workloads.

Also announced at Oracle OpenWorld by Oracle is a new SpecJappServer2004 result. Similar to Oracle’s application benchmarks, this industry-standard benchmark combines different activities to emulate data flow through an enterprise. Unlike Oracle Application Standards, the SpecJappServer2004 has a single size of data and results are reported in Java Operations per Second.

The tests were conducted using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 on HP DL785 with AMD 8439 processors. Deploying Oracle’s WebLogic server across 48 cores returned tremendous results. With a performance of 9,455.17 jopps/s, Oracle and HP set a new single node record, which was over 20 percent faster than the Sun Solaris on SPARC results published earlier this year.

As these benchmark results reinforce, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an operating system leader with broad application support and the ability to contribute to record-setting performance on the workloads that our customers’ businesses rely upon.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here.

We are pleased to announce that Red Hat’s Data Services Platform, specifically MetaMatrix 5.5.3, has achieved Common Criteria certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2. This is a significant milestone for Red Hat’s data services solutions and adds another Common Criteria certification to the Red Hat portfolio, in line with the goals we set in November 2007.

Recognized in 25 countries, Common Criteria is a set of internationally approved guidelines for evaluating and certifying the information security of IT products and information systems. The certification gives private and public sector organizations the confidence that the evaluated IT solution complies with widely accepted security standards.

Data services platforms have become more important as the business world continues to face ever-increasing scrutiny and regulation. The Common Criteria certification for our Data Services Platform, MetaMatrix 5.5.3 shows that the solution complies with these worldwide security standards, making it an attractive option for a security-conscious company or government agency.

Red Hat’s Data Services Platform can help bridge the gap between the data you have and the data you need, reducing the time and cost of software development and integration. This solution facilitates the development of systems that provide consistent, integrated data in real time with enterprise performance, security and management capabilities allowing customers to make better use of existing information assets and work already done.

Red Hat’s Data Services Platform, MetaMatrix, is the latest Red Hat solution to meet the stringent requirements for Common Criteria – the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform received its certification in July 2009. To see the full listing of security-certified Red Hat solutions, please visit our Certifications and Accreditations page.

The weather is getting colder and leaves are changing color in the northern hemisphere, signaling the start of fall. Much to our delight, this also means that the latest version of Fedora is expected to be available soon! Released approximately every six months (generally around May Day and Halloween), Fedora 12 is expected to be loaded with new feature functionality and continue to advance free and open source software and content.

Red Hat’s software development model relies on its active sponsorship of leading open source projects, including the Fedora Project, which produces the Fedora distribution. Fedora combines and showcases the latest in open source technologies anyone can download, use, and remix, and also serves as the technology foundation of Red Hat’s commercial products. By providing cutting-edge technology, Fedora helps advance the development of open source worldwide, and the technologies found in Fedora may be incorporated later into other Linux distributions as well.

Ever wonder how great features make it from the community into enterprise-ready technology like Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Take a look at the below video to learn more.

There are many features that started in Fedora and are now included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. PackageKit and PolicyKit are two prime examples. PackageKit is a system designed to make installing and updating software easier, through a set of easy-to-use command-line and graphical utilities. It also integrates software management with desktop activities like clicking on packages or entering commands in a terminal. PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling the rules by which unprivileged processes can speak to privileged processes. It also provides a framework for centralizing these access policies for use in managed environments.

PolicyKit first debuted in Fedora 8, and PackageKit in Fedora 9, and have been refined upstream thanks to the wide exposure they receive first in Fedora. They are expected to debut in a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release where customers will also benefit from these refinements.

We’re counting down the weeks until Fedora 12 is released. Keep your eyes peeled for a series of blogs highlighting some of the cool features we anticipate in Fedora 12.